Super Casino by Pete Earley Inside the "New" Las Vegas

In this lively and probing book, award-winning author Pete Earley traces the extraordinary evolution of Las Vegas -- from the gaudy Mecca of the Rat Pack era to one of the country's top family vacation spots. He revisits the city's checkered history of moguls, mobsters, and entertainers, reveals the real stories of well-known power brokers like Steve Wynn and legends like Howard Hughes and Bugsy Siegel, and offers a fascinating portrait of the life, death, and fantastic rebirth of the Las Vegas Strip.

Earley also documents the gripping tale of the entrepreneurs behind the rise and fall and rise again of one of the largest gaming corporations in the nation, Circus Circus -- to which he was given unique access. In his trademark you-are-there style, he takes us behind the scenes to meet the blackjack dealers and hookers, the heavy hitters and bit players, the security officers, cabbies, and showgirls who are caught up in the mercurial pace that pulses at the heart of this astounding city.

Pete Earley is a former Washington Post reporter and winner of the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar for Best Fact Crime Book in 1996 for Circumstantial Evidence: Death, Life, and Justice in a Southern Town. His book, which also won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, helped free an innocent man from Alabama's death row. Earley's account of the John Walker spy ring, Family of Spies, was a New York Times bestseller and CBS mini-series. The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison was a national bestseller and was based on a year that Earley spent inside a maximum security federal prison as an author. Born in Arizona, Earley was reared in Colorado and worked for newspapers in Kansas and Oklahoma before moving to the Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C., where he lives with his wife, Patti. They have seven children.

Publishers Weekly

Earley does not comment directly on the broader moral issues of gambling: halfway through the book, he quotes a cabbie who says the city is based on greed, but near the end, he cites a Luxor manager who asserts that it's a place ""where people come to forget their problems."" Andres Martinez's 24...

https://bookpage.com

Pete Earley, the investigative reporter who wrote The Hot House about Leavenworth, and also published exposes about the Aldrich Ames and John Walker spy cases, has a new book, Super Casino: Inside the New Las Vegas.

LV Revealed

David G. Schwartz

Like a first-timer overexcited by the lights of the Strip and the flash and glitter of the casino, it is easy for a writer on Las Vegas to become absorbed into the hype machine and eschew his or her carefully considered prospectus for a fevered search for the “real” Las Vegas, which can be found ...